Lateral Geniculate Nucleus
by Muffytaj
Summary: When half a minute is still too slow. SasuSaku, of a sorts. Complete.
1. Sakura

**Lateral Geniculate Nucleus**

A split second is the time it takes for the mind to register an image. It can take a couple of seconds more for the brain to make sense of that image, and sometimes almost a minute for the full implication of that image to sink in.

Sakura, being the highly trained ninja that she was, managed to take in all the repercussions of what she was seeing in under half a minute.

But she was still too slow.

The second raid was better planned, and much more successful. With half of Konoha at their back, Naruto, Kakashi and she had invaded the Sound village, swearing to burn it down, and then salt the earth. Those who could not be converted would be destroyed.

They had, by Jiraya's reckoning, a couple of weeks before Orochimaru's time was up, and he would be forced to take over Sasuke's body. The intelligence and medic units had decided that Orochimaru would wait until the last possible moment before moving to a new host body, in order to limit deterioration.

The infiltration had been fairly standard: set up a bit of distraction along the east borderline, whilst troops moved in from the south-west. Naruto and Sakura, being familiar with the layout, lead the way, and breached the locale with only a few minor killings. Security had been steadily increased concurrent to the nearing of Orochimaru's change-over time, but Shino had been in place for the last week and so had all the sentries tagged with bugs, which made it simple to keep tabs on them. Which, if Sakura thought about it, was kinda gross, but then most ninja abilities were, really.

Naruto made securing the area a lot easier. Standard procedure was to have ninjas run along the hallways, slip flash-tags under the doors and then once they went off, temporarily blinding everyone in the room, to kick open the door and throw a hail of kunai into the room, until everyone inside said room had been reduced to a pile of bloodied flesh. Naruto, with his numerous solid clones, could perform the entire operation simultaneously, and in utter safety.

In fact, the entire thing was going off without a hitch, as one of the chuunin muttered. Which is just asking for trouble.

Whilst Naruto was tied up with searching the secured rooms, and Kakashi was firing off rapid commands to the different units, Sakura raced through the corridors to where she had last met Sasuke all those months ago. It was foolish, she knew, but then she also knew that Sasuke had seriously underestimated her last time, and was unlikely to attack her before the backup squad arrived, by which point she should have gathered sufficient data as to his mindset. A thin excuse, created to please her superiors if she was later questioned. Her real motive? She just wanted to see Sasuke again. It was almost a compulsion. She wanted to see him, to hear his voice, to watch to see how he squinted his eyes slightly when the sun was getting in them, or if his hair still made that soft crinkling noise when he ran his hands through it.

She wanted Sasuke.

He was there.

His back was to her as she came to a gasping halt in the giant crater. He was still wearing that ridiculously oversized belt, and those loose, flowing clothes. Clothes which could be easily grabbed and used to hold him down, clothes which bragged that he was beyond your level of experience, and thus could afford to have such a handicap.

Clothes she wanted off him.

He turned as she called his name, awkward on her tongue from disuse. His hair still flew everywhere and his clothes made a crisp snap as he moved. As he caught sight of her, he gave that funny little almost-smile he used to use around her sometimes.

Half a minute for her to realise what she was seeing.

Too late.

He was by her side, long fingers closing around her mouth, clamping it shut. Dark tattoos ran underneath eyes that were no longer Sasuke's, and a perversely long tongue dragged itself down the nape of her neck. He said something then, the monster in Sasuke's skin, something soft and quiet whilst his once-Sasuke's body was pressed up against her.

She did not hear, because by then her hands were already charged with chakra, whistling through the air as they came crashing down to destroy the thing that had taken her Sasuke.

He caught them. Easily, almost gently, he unclenched her fists, and released her. A small grimace flashed across his face, and his left arm shook. He paused for a moment, and once again Sakura struck.

She would have been faster, had she been attacking anyone else. She would have pushed harder too. But there was still Sasuke's face, looking at her, and Sasuke's hair getting in his eyes and Sasuke's stupid, stupid hands once again grabbing her, holding her still, moving along her body.

But it was not Sasuke's eyes, looking out at her. It was Orochimaru's.

Dimly, she realised that there were pinpricks in her wrists, where he had first grabbed her. A clear droplet of something fell from one of the tiny holes.

As all her strength left her body with a whoosh, she knew that she had been poisoned. Not fatally, but enough to paralyse her. If history was anything to go by, Sasu- no, Orochimaru, would probably position her by the entrance of the tunnel, stand behind her, and then wait until her other team-mates came rushing through. He would allow one moment for maximum impact, for them to see her, and then he would slit her throat.

It was tactically brilliant, killing a foe and demoralizing the enemy in one fell swoop. It was what any ninja would have done under the circumstances.

He made no move to do so.

He knelt down beside her, tilting her head back in a lazy movement so he could see her face better.

"He's still in here." He said. His voice was a strange mesh of Orochimaru's and Sasuke's, and it struck Sakura to her very core. His left arm started shaking again, and with a small exclamation of irritation, Orochimaru grabbed her hand with his left one. The shaking stopped. "He is not too difficult to control, of course, and with time it will become easier, but right now I can't afford to have my aim or concentration thrown off in the slightest. I'm sure you understand." And once again he gave her that funny almost-smile, and she wondered if it were Orochimaru or Sasuke she was seeing.

He slowly gathered her up into his arms, and lifted her off the ground. Sakura had been carried by Sasuke before, several times actually, and for a single moment she allowed herself to dream that it was really Sasuke holding her, that it was his heart beating underneath her cheek, his warmth seeping through her paralysed body. She imaged it was the two of them again, and that once again there was hope. But only for a moment.

'Here it comes,' Sakura thought, 'he is going to put me by the entrance.'

But instead he carried her to the back of the pit and placed her behind some protruding rocks. A small blanket had been positioned out there, and a pillow. Gently he put her down, making sure she was comfortable, even if she couldn't really feel her body. And then, crouched down beside her, he reached forward and kissed her full of the lips. His left hand grasped her shoulder tightly for a second as he deepened the kiss, and it was Sasuke's kiss; awkward and unsure but wanting nevertheless, and something seemed to flicker in the eyes that were not Sasuke's, as if a shadow had passed over the light.

And then it was gone, and Orochimaru-in-Sasuke was leaning back, smirking in a way that had Sakura longing for control of her fists, if only to smash his face in. There was a small noise by the entrance, and Orochimaru stood up, nudging Sakura's arm with his foot.

"I'll be back later." He said, showing far too much teeth, "To keep Sasuke-kun quiet. For now though, I have to go deal with our guests."

And then the screaming started.


	2. Kabuto

**Chapter Two**

It was, Kabuto claimed, purely professional interest. He had heard rumours of the girl's precise chakra control, and it was not often he was able to discuss medicine with someone he wasn't currently experimenting on. Orochimaru he might have been able to talk to, but they were hardly equal and the best debates are always among people you can freely argue with.

And besides, he had to keep in close contact with Sakura anyway, in order to continue dosing her with the poison. He knew that she had probably already come up with a plan to escape should he be even a minute too slow and a breath of movement return to her body, so it wasn't as if he was going out of his way to talk to her.

She was simply there, and conscious, two qualifications which made her better companion than most of the people in the village. The majority of the other ninjas in the compound tended to either be experiments, or true soldiers. That is, people without much interest in anything outside of their specialised fields.

Sakura was different, and could actually understand what he was saying. And, when he modified the poison to allow her to talk, and she had eventually run out of swear words to throw at him, she had been able to give him intelligent replies.

He hadn't gotten around to asking Orochimaru for permission to modify her dosage, but she never spoke when Orochimaru was around anyway. She simply watched him with too-large eyes, a terrible hunger erasing all humanity from her face.

She was breaking, bit by bit, and they all knew it.

It could take a professionally trained ninja from anywhere between a week and years to break, depending on the level of 'persuasion' applied. The only exception was with genjutsus, but they were an exception to most of the rules. Interestingly, once the torturer crossed the line between non-lethal and lethal damage, even if it didn't kill them for quite some time, the victim usually stopped talking. They were dead, and they knew it.

But Kabuto never put a knife to Sakura. He knew he could, if asked to, but Orochimaru never gave the order, and it was obvious to Kabuto that Orochimaru, garbed as he was in Sasuke's form, inflicted on Sakura the kind of pain Kabuto could only hope to emulate.

That didn't stop him though, in the privacy of the night, from imagining what she would look like if he was allowed to torture her. How her face would twist, her body involuntarily try to squirm away for his tools, the short, ragged pants, the arc of her back as he hit a nerve cluster and the screams, oh the screams that would eventually pour out of her mouth. Scream following scream, one after another until finally they would blend together and it would become one long cry, ripping from her throat, all her soul being poured into it until she was spent.

His alarm would wake him from those dreams and, dripping with sweat, he would get up and administer another dose to Sakura's sleeping form.

She was not always asleep though, and sometimes he fancied that she saw what his baggy clothing hid, and hated him for it. The days after such nights, he didn't talk to her much. There wasn't really anything to say.

Time passed, and Orochimaru began to spend more time with Sakura. Hour upon hour he would sit there, watching her. She could not move, and she did not speak, so there was really no reason for such rapt attention, in Kabuto's opinion. It would be like watching an overly large doll. Which, considering some of the outfits Orochimaru sometimes demanded she be dressed in, probably wasn't too far off the mark.

"Really," Kabuto muttered to himself one day as he was changing Sakura (she always had her eyes wide open during such procedures, and the blaze of hatred in them made Kabuto continually double-check her dosage) "if he wanted a doll, couldn't he have broken a civilian and used them instead?"

"He says it keeps Sasuke-kun happy."

It was the first time she had spoken whilst he was changing her, and Kabuto was so surprised he nearly dropped her. As it was, she slipped and he had to grab her naked waist tightly and pull her towards him. She flopped against his chest, her head resting on his shoulder in a distorted embrace.

"I very much doubt Sasuke-kun still retains his consciousness." Kabuto said quietly. Sakura needed to be bathed, he saw, and her hair washed. Her cheek felt wet against his shoulder, as if she had been crying. And yet he had never seen her shed a tear. Interesting.

"You don't know Sasuke-kun." She said simply, and that was the end of that. Something very akin to irritation rose within Kabuto. He had thought her more sensible than that. But Kabuto could hear Orochimaru making his way into the room, so he roughly shoved her arms into her new dress, and nearly threw her into place. He brushed her hair out of her eyes; a cold, clinical movement - Orochimaru was at the door now - and stood up.

"Has our Sakura been behaving herself?" Orochimaru asked, as he always did. Kabuto never knew who he was refer to in the 'our': whether it was Orochimaru and himself, or Orochimaru and Sasuke, and he did not enquire. Some things, it was better not to know.

"As always." He replied, and smiled.


	3. Orochimaru

**Chapter Three**

The amount of sabotage someone can do whilst paralysed from the head down is extremely limited. Even if they are an expert in the field (which Sakura was not) the lack of movement would be a severe inhibitor.

The only things Sakura had were her tongue, and her mind. And against Kabuto's calm façade, it was difficult to find a purchase, some way to get into his head and start twisting.

There were the common touchy subjects: lovers, family, loyalty, usefulness, ability. The general vitality of his manhood, and the lineage of his parents. Threats were merely made ridiculous by her inability to back them up, and bribes would have been useless. Kabuto's loyalty to Orochimaru made money irrelevant.

This Orochimaru knew, and so he knew he was safe to leave Kabuto in charge of her. He also knew that Kabuto was uninterested in the subjects he was taking care of, and so there was no danger of emotional attachment.

He was wrong, as it turned out, but he never had a chance to discover that.

He knew that she was able to talk, of course. Kabuto, for whatever reason, had allowed her to, and this did not particularly bother Orochimaru. The habit she had of sometimes moving her lips involuntarily, mouthing the words 'Sasuke-kun' over and over, had been annoying at first, but after a while it had become almost soothing.

It also kept Sasuke quiet, and extremely complacent; which, whilst no longer quite so necessary, made life much easier in general for Orochimaru. At first he had always had to be near Sakura: touching her, holding clothes she had worn, looking at pictures of her, Naruto and Kakashi, and the only way to subdue Sasuke completely during a mission or an important meeting had been to threaten Sakura with bodily harm. But after a time, Sasuke had been more and more content to simply look at Sakura.

If he had chosen to, Orochimaru could have utterly crushed what little remained of Sasuke's spirit during such lax moments.

Instead he merely waited.

Orochimaru had never been in love. In lust, yes, a thousand times and more: with knowledge, with power, with women, with men, with weapons and with scrolls. He lusted after everything it was possible to attain, and refused to give up on anything.

But love of the sort Sasuke seemed to feel; awkward and unwilling, begrudging and grumpy, whilst at the same time soft and protective, with a sort of secret little joy growing deep down beneath the drive for revenge, this was unknown to Orochimaru, and as an unknown it interested him.

Orochimaru wanted immortality in order to explore all the unknowns and, since he knew himself rather well, he knew the chances of him actually falling in love where slim.

So he sat, and watched. He categorised each different expression that flitted across Sakura's face when he got near, and the way Sasuke and his heartbeat would speed up whenever he walked in on Kabuto changing Sakura's outfit. In a spirit of perverse mischief Orochimaru regularly demanded that Sakura be dressed in different outfits, each one more provocative than the last.

The effect on Sasuke was interesting, to say the least. At first he felt only arousal and hot shame, but as the days passed and Orochimaru began draping himself negligently around Sakura Sasuke's emotions turned towards rage at Orochimaru.

Each time he touched Sakura she would stare at him, as if wondering whether it was Orochimaru or Sasuke holding her. Sometimes Orochimaru let Sasuke rise to the surface in those times, and the change in Sakura's expression was almost pitiful. They all knew that Sasuke was no longer the Sasuke that she knew, and that he was only let out for Orochimaru's amusement, but there was something almost pure in those times they met. Both had lost everyone else they loved, and they clung to each other as a drowning man would cling to a rope.

And then Orochimaru would emerge again, nibbling at her skin, laughing as she stopped smiling and her eyes once again glazed over in horror and hatred.

The day after such activities Kabuto would report that Sakura had not slept. Orochimaru would just laugh softly, and feel the person inside him rage.

The problem began when one morning Sakura didn't wake up. Nothing too unusual about that – sometimes she'd go into deep meditations in an attempt to escape the prison that was her body, and after an hour or two of Orochimaru talking to her with Sasuke's voice she would return to the world with a start, eyes full of an impossible hope before reality would sink in, and she would once again register that it was Orochimaru in front of her, not Sasuke.

Every time he would watch as the hope died from her eyes, to be replaced by a dull shine as she once again experienced the loss of Sasuke. And every time she would break a little bit more.

But that day she didn't wake, even after four hours of gentle chatter. Curious, Orochimaru slithered to her side, and ignored the sudden jerk that informed him Sasuke was once again trying to gain control of their body. The attempt was weaker than the one last week – as time went on Sasuke was slowly being integrated into Orochimaru's persona. But something in the franticness of Sasuke's attack made Orochimaru sit up and pay attention.

He laid a hand against Sakura's cheek, and grimaced slightly at the coldness. Her breathing was quick and shallow, and sweat was beginning to run down her face.

Something had gone seriously wrong.

"Kabuto!" He shouted, flashing to the door. "Kabuto!"

"Yes, Orochimaru-sama?" Kabuto, who looked oddly ruffled, as if Orochimaru had roused him from a particularly pleasant dream, hastily appeared in the doorway.

"When did our Sakura fall asleep? What dosage did you give her last night?"

"She fell asleep almost immediately after you left yesterday evening, and I gave her to same dosage as ever. Why?" Kabuto glanced over to Sakura's inert form, taking note of her slackened expression and uneven breathing. In an instant he was knelt down beside her, prying open her eyelids and flashing a light into her pupils. There was no reaction. Kabuto turned to face Orochimaru, the light he was holding catching his glasses and hiding his expression.

"She's dying."

A brief pause, then Orochimaru was on the ground on all fours, desperately fighting Sasuke for control. Rage, rage such as he had never known, swept through his body as Sasuke screamed for control, if only so he could stab Orochimaru and himself, to destroy, to kill, to obliterate everything because once again he was losing a loved one and that could not happen, he had to stop this, he had to break free!

Sasuke began to rip himself free of Orochimaru's hold as the last remnant of his sanity lay dying in front of them.

Began to, but could not succeed. The jutsu which bound Orochimaru to Sasuke's body was too strong, and within minutes Orochimaru was once again in control, pushing Sasuke to the side, and ignoring his tortured howls. Sasuke had made a contract with the devil, and that was not a thing to be lightly relinquished.

"Get her into the examination room." Orochimaru managed to say as he clambered to his feet.

In the harsh light of the examination room Sakura's pale skin looked even worse, and the sweat, now flowing freely, glistened under the lamp.

"I must have somehow overdosed her with poison," Kabuto was saying as he injected some antidote directly into Sakura's lateral thigh muscles. "Her deteriorating body condition must have worsened the effect of the poison, she's been unconscious for over ten hours though, the chances of her awakening with an undamaged mental state is mini-"

Kabuto's habitual medical monologue was cut off when he realised two things: the first was the slight tinge of blue chakra coursing through the blood dripping from the pinprick the needle had made, and the second that the spare scalpel he had placed next to Sakura was missing.

Kabuto was as well trained as Sakura. He knew the different uses chakra could be put to, and that it was possible to store up enough chakra in order to change the chemicals in your body. Theoretically it was possible to use your chakra to burn poison out of your blood, but there was no record of anyone ever actually have the pure precision of chakra control capable of achieving it without accidentally exploding themselves.

Besides, the poison he used suppressed chakra. Where on earth could she have pulled a reserve of chakra large enough to perform such an act? It wasn't like she had a demon in her, or a curse seal, or anything that could possibly be used to –

Half a minute for these thoughts to race through his head; for him to see her hand twitch, to feel the blade coming, to twist away. Too slow, far too slow, a lesson Sakura herself had learnt before and didn't hesitate to impart on Kabuto.

"Shannaro!" She screamed as the scalpel sunk into Kabuto's chest and, with a faintly surprised expression, he slid to the floor. Before his corpse had even hit the ground she had flipped up off the table, and lashed a foot out at Orochimaru's face. He jumped back hastily, his hands already forming seals, no doubt to kill her. She was too dangerous to keep alive anymore. In a normal fight, Sakura would have been dead almost instantly.

But Orochimaru had to fight against a Sasuke who had been waiting for an opportunity, and just before Orochimaru formed the final seal Sasuke unleashed an attack that all but dislodged Orochimaru's control. Sasuke slammed himself against the barriers of the jutsu that bound Orochimaru to himself, screaming silently in the depths of his body as he stilled Orochimaru's movements and attacked Orochimaru's consciousness. Orochimaru-Sasuke's face distorted in agony at the internal war as Sasuke's personality slowly disintegrated from the ferocity of his attack. Each time Sasuke rammed up against Orochimaru another part of Sasuke's self splintered off and disappeared.

He was ripping himself apart from the inside out.

Sasuke couldn't win control of his body again though. He knew this. The contract was too binding, and Orochimaru was too ingrained into him. The fight for freedom would end almost immediately, and Sasuke would have utterly destroyed himself in the process.

He knew this. And yet he fought anyway.

For in that brief time where Orochimaru was not in control, that fatal half minute where Sasuke was holding his body in check, Sakura reached him, and wrapped her hands around his throat. Crying now, the tears she had held back for so long blurred her vision, wiping out Orochimaru's dark tattoos and the slight changes his inhabitation had made until she saw only the Sasuke she had known and loved for so long, she leant forward and kissed him. Her cold, chapped lips brushed up against his bloodied ones, and his left hand ghosted along her arm in a movement so light it might almost have been imagined, and then her grip tightened and twisted, and there was a snap, then nothing.

Slowly Sakura released the body, letting it fall to the floor. Her eyes were curiously blank as she collected some weapons from the room. Looking down at the dead man at her feet, a small quiver of emotion disturbed her rigid exterior. Carefully, as if she still feared the enemy alive, she lifted up the person that had once been Sasuke and carried him out of the room.

She would carry him back to Konoha, killing any who got in her way. And there she would bury him.

And after that she would return to Sound, and kill every last ninja it held. Set in her grim determination, she held Sasuke's body closer to her chest, and began running.

She did not look back.


End file.
